


The Messenger of the Covenant

by xngurevar



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Operation Regisurp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-29
Updated: 2016-05-29
Packaged: 2018-07-10 19:33:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7003459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xngurevar/pseuds/xngurevar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vriska dies in a fire for great justice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Messenger of the Covenant

It was possible the black queen already had some presentiment of her future. Shortly after she'd taken off her ring, she'd disappeared into her cedar grove and stopped acknowledging radio signals. 

The royal cedars, the only trees anywhere on Derse, exhaled a stench of camphor and formaldehyde, which used to attract businesses of civil servants to spend their coffee breaks gossiping outside the wrought-iron bars. Now the whole quarter lay deserted. Only the parcel courier still carried the queen's mail to the locked gates, which might have been how Vriska knew where to find her.

Terezi was finishing closing arguments before the Star Chamber, who were being held at scythepoint by the temporary bailiff. After His Honorable Tyranny's chalk likeness had held Vriska in contempt of court for unauthorized live-tweeting, she'd gone—the session's only god—to revoke the mandate of heaven.

 _Like a cinder dancing on the wind, out of the conflagration of revolution, setting on fire the hearts of the people with admiration for their liberators_ (as a legacy propaganda rhetorician, whom someone had forgotten to deactivate, would write on the occasion of the coup's anniversary, not long before the Miles tore Derse apart), Vriska flew from a palace spire, trailing blue sparks, and drifted down among the spiky treetops into the gloom of the grove.

She found the black queen smoking in a naked iron gazebo. "Your ex-majesty!" she called out as she dropped beneath the lowest branches.

The queen raised her eyes Ringward, apparently unperturbed, and exercised her lapsed prerogative to remain seated. Vriska's wings blurred as she hovered, making the fallen needles stir. The harsh orange glow of her vestments cast shadows in the purple cracks of the trunks.

"We're only asking for exile, not death. What a relief, right?"

In a rasping voice thin with smoke, the queen said, "I used to be your lusus, you know."

"You used to be a lot of things! You used to be queen of Derse."

"You've never wondered? Wanted to ask?"

"No! Ask what?"

"Why she made you kill to feed her. Whether it was just."

"I don't care! I'm glad she's dead! Anyway, you're nothing anymore. A perfectly generic black queen."

"Poor larva. All right, then. Many greetings, from her lusus, to the Seer."

The cigarette's ember, under its caul of ash, glowed the color of Vriska's hood. The queen tapped it clean on the rim of the obsidian ashtray, then flicked the bright coal at Vriska's feet. It lit on the needle-strewn ground and gave off a curl of pale smoke. The queen turned her face away, concluding the audience, as a twig went up in a crackle of resin.

Vriska cupped the thin hot updraft in her wings and threw it back down in a rolling wave of air that made the tiny flames heel over, then right themselves and creep outward into a shining carpet of fire. "Death before exile, huh? I can respect that! You can't make me run away, though. I'm a god."

By then, the white smoke had gone up from the Star Chamber's spire. Technically, Vriska was carrying out a legal sentence—and "technically legal," as Terezi knew, is synonyms with "legal." Neither history nor propaganda opines on how exactly Vriska could have known this death would be free of any tincture of heroism or of justice; and the queen's pride wouldn't have let her ask.

Flame climbed the trunks along the tracks of the oily sap. Vriska still floated, though the black-edged tatters of her wings hung on their skeletons. A weird green light chased the flames reflected in her glasses. The queen was turning dull red at the joints. Above their heads, in the column of smoke from the burning grove, a purple battleship yawed, like the hand of an enormous clock.

Vriska rapidly carbonized. The queen glowed red-hot to the points of her crown.

When the grove had burned to the roots, and the many-colored flames of Vriska's last resurrection had died down, the queen stood and cast down her crown. She seized a cable the battleship dropped and rose up into the black sky, leaving a blue-and-orange cinder alone on a field of ashes.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Messenger of the Covenant (DVD Commentary Track 1)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7473630) by [conceptofzero](https://archiveofourown.org/users/conceptofzero/pseuds/conceptofzero)




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